


Acceptable Cost

by gogollescent



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-16
Updated: 2013-11-16
Packaged: 2018-01-01 18:46:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1047321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Erwin and Hanji have a late-night encounter, sort of. Takes place ~five years before the fall of Wall Maria.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Acceptable Cost

For his twenty-sixth birthday, Hanji and the others drag him to a new pub in Shiganshina called “The Titan’s Head,” complete with crudely painted teeth around the doorway and eyes higher up on the facade. What would be a tasteless joke inside Sina seems, here on the outskirts of Wall Maria, more like sympathetic bravado: the denizens of Shiganshina complain as myopically as Utopian politicians about their taxes filling Titan bellies, but the stupidity of it is merely desperate, not ingrained—a palliative, against the truth that not only their taxes but their children, homes and livelihoods are so much fresh-caught bait.

Still, it’s not the place he would have picked; though he knows a number of the younger Corps members have singled it out as the preferred means of practicing for death.

"…And when you try this beer, you’ll  _wish_  you’d been eaten,” as Hanji tells him before buying everyone another round. They’re the obvious ringleader of the festivities, although he suspects Mike of supplying vital information to the mob. Certainly, if the preponderance of people congratulating him on turning thirty-five is anything to go by—

—but Hanji is still speaking.

"I hope you’ll forgive us the ambush, sir. It takes a lot, you know, to detach you from your desk!"

Laughter. Some of his more habitually nervous subordinates relax: if Team Leader Hanji can make fun of Squad Leader Smith’s work ethic, it’s probably okay that he’s seen them in a  _drinking establishment._  To reassure them Erwin takes a deep draught from his mug, which coincidentally dispels the need to answer.

The irony, of course, is that Hanji is probably the one person in the Corps more tethered to their job than he is. Ever since their return from the 44th Expedition, they’ve thrown themselves into—research, he thinks; not only into the more esoteric and outdated writings on Titans that the standard trainee curriculum excludes, but in comparative biology, anatomy, and physics, all supplemented by regular interviews conducted with the older veterans of the Corps. About their experiences of Titans as bodies, and not an unmatchable force.

Erwin has already done his interview, though, and Hanji, beneath the sharp-edged cheer, without any motive for attendance but friendship, is beginning to show signs of party fatigue by the time they make their fourth assault on the barkeep’s back shelf. They more than he are evidently impatient with the growing, raucous crowd. He sees them tip their bottle against the corner of the table, keeping it in place with one finger across the mouth; sees them spin it a few times like an axle—he imagines wire unrolling from around the dark brown glass. He is himself by this point fairly drunk. Hanji lifts their finger and lets the bottle fall, only to catch it by the tapered neck a foot above the floorboards; for a moment he thinks they are going to break it against the leg of their chair, or their own hand. As he saw the immaterial mechanisms of the 3DMG form themselves around a simple turning cylinder, so he now perceives the fracture lines, the explosion of curved shards—a moment of violence so brilliant that the flying dark glass would at last catch the light of the fire and transmute its weight to gold. And probably take some civilian’s eye out, with their luck.

But Hanji only lowers the bottle gently to the ground, like a child freeing an insect; and when it’s stably resting on the coarse grain of the wood, they make deliberate eye contact from along the table’s edge, and kick it toward him. Without thinking he traps it under the raised toe of one boot.

Hanji winks at him. They make their excuses to Nanaba, the curly blondish person they’ve nominally been conversing with for the last half hour; a moment later they’re gone. Feeling peculiarly contrary—Hanji, after all, was the one who masterminded this whole celebration, though Erwin is willing to admit that, if his first team leader had not, another would have organized similar, in the ancient military tradition of delegation and individually replaceable personnel—he remains where he is for some little while longer, and participates in the ritualistic singalong of “You are the Beer and We are the Bunting,” before slipping out under the guise of ‘needing a bit of fresh air.’

Though perhaps he needs fresh air as well, he thinks, out in the cold, soundless street, with the darkened windows of residential buildings staring blindly down. Shiganshina is a strange city: utterly dependent on the secure lands inside Maria for agriculture, lumber, moral justification of its existence—and yet proud, despite all that. Like an upright matron. Less crime-riddled than anywhere in Sina, though that doesn’t mean a great deal, these days… a satellite, but it believes in its own stiff centrality. He sometimes wonders what it would be like to grow up as a child on these carefully-maintained cobblestone streets, as undefended and unconsidered by your species as if you were a fingernail, a nerveless extremity, and in all senses an acceptable cost. The children, he’s heard, run almost wild, and the government hardly bothers with subsidized schooling for people who may never move any closer to the lands of the innards and heart.

"Hey," says Hanji, and yanks him sideways into a dead-end alley.

It's very dark. The tall houses on either side lean towards each other; there’s just a strip of stars visible from the street, like a line of braille. He stumbles when Hanji lets go of his arm, catches himself on the slimy wall—sees them light a match, in a too-close uptick of meaning.

"You smoke, right? Sir."

A quick smile there, thick with softening intent: but eerie, too, when seen by the faint light of their cupped hands. Teeth reddened blades. Shrugging, he takes the cigarette from them, aware of transient remorse for his impressions; Hanji is young and trying sincerely to remake themselves, though he forgets it. Easy to mistake them for a creature of war, not molded to the ungrateful and quotidian world, here in the dark with their face red-dipped like a flame or an afterimage of sun; but though the tired, abstruse, unrelenting or -relieved indifference of their expression at the pub is still a vivid stamp in memory, they  _are_  smiling: or at least the grin has not yet faded from their eyes. Erwin exhales smoke in a bluish, organic tangle, and Hanji takes the cigarette back and sucks up pale ash.

"Do you want a victory escort back to HQ?" they ask, smoke tusking from both sides of their mouth. "I was going to loiter out here and stargaze, but since you happened to be passing by…"

He smiles. “A longer wait out in the elements won’t kill me, soldier.” Elements: scattered garbage, vegetable matter, Hanji’s discarded bottle in his pocket. Hanji, he supposes, head bent and fingers elegant, hair falling down loose over their dark eyes.

"Great!" says Hanji, muffled through two palms, and comes up to air again with an actual smoke ring, rising as an echo of chains. "Well, I’m sure we can find at  _least_ three and a half constellations between us.”

"Actually, I wanted to ask how your reading was going." Silence. "The cannibals?"

"Oh, that." They begin, absently, to divest themselves of their gear, which he'd expected when he refused the alternative venue. "It’s interesting, definitely—makes me wonder if there are people out there right now, getting eaten with no giants involved. Eh?" A gesture, from hands to hips, that he decides not to acknowledge, except by mentally bracing himself for a night that will be hard on his newly-aged patellas. "But in a way it feels like a cheat, to imagine Titans are anything like ye olde humans. Killing us for a reason. Seeing that we don’t go to waste after."

"I see your point," he says. And he does, really; though he’s not sure he’d be so quick to draw a line. Thinking of the king on his comfortable throne. "So you’ll be moving on to a new area of study?"

"Yes, I think so."

He can feel, alongside the dim push of impatience, the alcohol wearing off. His thoughts move slowly, but in their customary order, even if every sentence must be strung together with a will. “Such as…?”

"I thought I’d begin by dissecting you," says Hanji, with a chuckle. "You’ve lived so long, you’re pretty much a strange species yourself. And maybe we could find out why you’ve been so successful! Eat your heart and gain its powers, hah?" Their leg gear slides off at the waist.

Suitably prompted, he drops to a kneeling posture, setting heavy hands on their neat hips. “Can I convince you to delay the progress of science a little?”

"Just until you’re commander," says Hanji. "You know you promised that when you were, you’d give my investigations all the support I could dream up."

"If," says Erwin. "I said if."

"Twenty-six, immortal," says Hanji, tucking the cigarette back between his lips; and reaches down, to unfasten their belt.


End file.
